Historian and Novelist Les Standiford shares news of his new books, his public appearances, his past work, and random thoughts on things literary.

Sunday, April 12, 2015

FUN TO BE MURDERED ON THE BEACH

--Always great to start a tour with lots of familiar faces in the crowd, including my sainted-mother-in-law Rhoda Kurzweil and good friends Stephan Placido and Karen Sattinger and many others. The store proprietor Diane Sinchuk has been boosting the work of yours truly since the days of John Deal and she continues on, despite the fact that I am now out of mysteries and into histories. The audience was about as engaged in the Q&A as any I have ever seen, largely because of the current drought conditions in California (and the looming shortage caused by over-development in South Florida as well.) The focus of WATER TO THE ANGELS is primarily on what happened in Southern California 100 years ago, but, history has a way of repeating itself. Mulholland built the LA Aqueduct as a way out of a drought that had plagued the city for more than a decade. He would never have dreamed that one day the population would surpass 10,000,000--as he often told city commissioners, "growth has its limits here." But, unfortunately, developers paid about as much attention back then as they do today.